Interview by Jenaid Rees, Commissioning EditorRino Rappuoli is the Global Head of Vaccines Research at Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics (Siena, Italy). Previously, he was Head of R&D (Sclavo, Italy), and then Head of Vaccine Research and Chief Scientific Officer at Chiron Corporation (CA, USA). Rappuoli earned his PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Siena (Siena, Italy) and has served as visiting scientist at Rockefeller University (NY, USA) and Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA, USA). His team developed the first recombinant bacterial vaccine (against pertussis) and the first conjugate vaccine against meningococcus C and A. He also worked on the MF59 adjuvant used in a vaccine against pandemic influenza and an experimental vaccine against Helicobacter pylori. Rappuoli and his team pioneered the genomic approach to vaccine development termed reverse vaccinology and used it to develop a vaccine against group B meningococcus. Among his scientific contributions, he was cofounder of the field of cellular microbiology, a discipline that has merged cell biology and microbiology. He is a member of numerous international associations, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Society for Microbiology and the European Molecular Biology Organization and serves on the Expert Review of Vaccines Editorial Board. He is also a recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize.